She used many other tricks besides this, as she confesses there: she would deliberately quarrel with him and make him angry, picking fights without any cause because she wished to be reconciled again. “Lovers’ quarrels renew love,” as the old saying has it: falling out renews their love. And, as Aristaenetus says, “Love’s delights are sweeter after wrongs”: injuries increase love, just as sunshine is more welcome after a cloud.

And surely this maxim is very true; for, as Ampelis tells Chrysis in the same Lucian, “If a lover is not jealous, angry, irritable, prone to quarrel, sigh and swear, he is no true lover.”

Kissing and fondling, hanging about her neck, protesting, swearing and invoking wishes are only ordinary symptoms, “signs of love still beginning and growing.” But if he is jealous, angry, ready to take offence, and so on, “you may hope for the best”: sweet sister, he is yours. Yet if you leave him untroubled, indulge him and please him, and he once sees that he has you securely, without any rival, his love will fade and he will care less for you.

“So far,” he says, “I can speak from experience. A rich fellow, Demophantus, was a suitor of mine. I appeared to neglect him and treated Calliades the painter more favourably before his eyes. ‘At first he went away, assailing me with words’: he left in a rage, cursing and swearing. But eventually he came back in submission, vowing and protesting that he loved me most dearly, that I should have everything he owned, and that he would kill himself for my sake. Therefore I advise you, dear sister Chrysis, and all young women, not to treat your suitors too kindly: ‘they grow insolent when they realize this’; it will make them proud and insolent.”

“Instead, reject them now and then; keep your distance. ‘If you will listen to me, shut him out once and again’: close your door to him once or twice; let him wait on you. Follow my advice, and you will make him frantic, bring him to pay handsomely, accept any terms, and do whatever you want.”

These are the usual practices; yet Melissa, in the same Lucian, seems to me to have devised a trick beyond them all. When her suitor grew lukewarm, she wrote her own name and that of one of his rivals on a piece of paper—“Melissa loves Hermotimus; Hermotimus loves Melissa”—and had it fastened to a post for everyone to see, and left it on the path where he used to walk. When the simple novice noticed it, “he believed it as soon as he read it”: he immediately took it for the truth and came raging to me, and so on. “And so, when I had despaired of his love, four months later I won him back.”

Eugenia drew Timocles as her valentine and wore his name at her breast for a long time afterwards. Camena picked Pamphilus as her dancing partner at Myson’s wedding, some say, for that was where she first saw him. Felicianus caught up with Caelia beside the road and offered his services; from this came further acquaintance, and from acquaintance, love. But who could recount half their devices? What experienced Aretino, what ingenious Lucian, or amorous Aristaenetus could do it?

They will deny and accept, firmly refuse what they nevertheless eagerly seek, and repel a suitor to make him return more eagerly. Pursue them and they flee; turn away and they follow you again like a shadow: “it follows the one who flees and flees the one who follows.” With a retreat that wins you back, a gentle reluctance, a smiling threat or a charming little fit of petulance, they will put you off. They have a thousand such different enticements. For, as the poet says,

Beauty is not enough; she who wishes to seem lovely Must not please her admirers in the common way. Sayings, wit, playfulness, conversation, charm and laughter Surpass the work of nature at its fairest.

It is not enough, though she looks fair, For her to offer ordinary courtesies; But pretty trifles, jokes, sayings and smiles Go far beyond what beauty can achieve.

Perhaps for this reason Philostratus, in his Images, represents various Loves: some young, some of one age and some of another; some winged; some of one sex and some of the other; some with torches, golden apples, darts, traps, snares and other devices in their hands, as Propertius has neatly depicted them in book 2, poem 29. Some interpret these figures as the different enticements or affections of lovers, which, if they cannot do so singly, may together batter down and overcome the strongest constitutions.

It is told of Decius and Valerian, those two notorious persecutors of the Church, that, when neither tortures nor promises could force a young Christian to sacrifice to their idols, as Jerome records, they tried another means of tempting him. They placed him in a beautiful garden and sent a young courtesan to caress him. She put her arms about his neck and kissed him, and did what must not be named, “handling him with her hands,” and so on, employing every possible enticement so that love might batter and besiege the man whom torture could not subdue. But his constancy was such that she could not overcome him; and when this last device failed, they left him to his own ways.

At Berkeley in Gloucestershire there was once a nunnery, says Walter Map, an old historian who lived four hundred years ago, “whose abbess was a beautiful lady of noble birth. Godwin, that crafty Earl of Kent, was travelling that way. Seeking not her but her possessions, he left a nephew of his, a handsome young gallant pretending to be ill, in her care until his return. He instructed the young man to keep up the pretence until he had deflowered the abbess and as many other nuns as he could. He also left him rings, jewels, girdles and similar trifles to give them whenever they visited him.”

“The young man willingly undertook the business and played his part so well that he soon made most of them pregnant. When he had finished, he told his lord how he had fared. His lord immediately went to court, told the king that this nunnery had become a brothel, secured an investigation, had the women expelled, and asked for the lands for himself.”